race/ethnicity

While whiteness is the neutral category (for example, see here and see here for the same phenomenon related to gender) and most, but not all, advertising is aimed at white people first, we all know that people of color DO appear in advertising, even when it’s obvious that the intended audience is mostly white. In this series, I’m going to offer some examples of how people of color are used in ads and some of the conditions under which they are included.

In this first post of the series, I offer you examples of ads that include people of color in order to associate the collectively-held meaning of the racial minority group (i.e., stereotypical traits, the social construction of the group) with the product.

This first one is my favorite (thanks to my student Kelly for submitting it).  The product is Dole Fruit Gel Bowls.  The text is: “There’s a feeling you get from the refreshing taste of real fruit.  Lighten up with Reduced Sugar flavors.  Life Is Sweet.”  So how do they convince us that “Fruit Gel” is “real fruit”?  By putting a “native” appearing woman with a “natural” hairstyle in a white cotton frock with flowers around her neck.

In this ad (thanks to my student, Jennifer, for submitting it) Verizon Broadband is telling us that we can download music fast.  What kind of music?  The kind associated with black folks, of course.  The text along the top reads: “Jazz. Rock. Trip Hop. Uptempo or down.”

Compare that version of the ad with this one (thanks to my student, Laura).  In this ad, the person is now an Asian woman and the type of music mentioned is “Classical. Soul. Hip Hop.”

This ad for IBM products features a middle aged Asian man, a type of person associated with high technology.

NEW:  This ad uses an Asian man to invoke the idea of a good worker.

These two ads for Kool cigarettes (thanks to my student, Eugene, for the first one, and this blog for the second) use Black men doing stereotypically Black things (playing the trumpet and djing) in order to try to transfer some of the cool associated with Black men to Kool cigarettes.  (Alternatively, these ads may be targeted directly at a Black audience.)

This one too:

Finally, this ad for the Ipod ipod-type thing (submitted by my student, Cheng) uses a young Asian man dancing.  We all know that white men can’t dance.

NEW!  In this ad, rhythm is represented by a black woman:

If anyone has more examples, I’d love to see them!

Next up: using people of color to signify, literally, color, or even spice or flavor.

Shieva K. took photos of these two posters, both part of the Boost Up campaign in New York City. Both were posted on the Upper West Side.

The Boost Up campaign is a joint venture between the U.S. Army and the Ad Council to encourage kids to stay in school. The ads feature actual teens who are at risk of dropping out of high school. When you go to the website, you can read a bio about each teen, including the difficulties they face in their home lives, etc. Then you can send a student a “boost,” meaning an email, text message, or post on FaceBook or YouTube, encouraging them to stay in school. You can also watch videos the teens have made about their lives.

The thing I find interesting about this campaign is the lack of any discussion of structural reasons these teens (predominantly racial/ethnic minorities) might be at risk of dropping out of school, or what that might have to do with wealthy people on the Upper West Side. Both the problem and the solution are presented as individual-level issues: teens struggle mostly because they have problems with their parents and unstable home lives, and we can help fix this problem by sending text messages saying “You can do it!” It’s “activism” with no actual need to get involved or think deeply about the problem–we don’t need to change the way schools are funded, wonder whether people who send their kids to private schools still have any responsibility to the public education system, or think about things like poverty, race, crumbling schools, and other structural issues that exist beyond the individual.

I guess any effort is better than nothing, but it seems like we’re basically saying, “Hey, kids! Overcome all your problems by thinking positively and having some strangers who have never met you, and probably can’t even begin to imagine what your life is like, spend 30 seconds writing you a message! That’s all it should really take, so if you still drop out of school, you must not have tried hard enough.” It fits very well into the American cultural ideology that I find so often among my students, the belief that anyone can overcome any disadvantage or hardship if they just try hard enough and “don’t give up”; if they don’t, they’re either lazy, didn’t believe in themselves, or in some other way are to blame. Regardless, there’s not much the rest of us can do about it.

Thanks, Shieva!

For our sociologist and sociologically-inclined readers:

As Wicked Anomie asks, “Sociologist and American are mutually exclusive categories?” Who knew!

She also notes:

…did you also notice that bit about “real issues,” and how they and racial/ethnic issues are mutually exclusive? So, we have the broader category of issues, then we have subcategories of racial/ethnic and “real.”

Indeed.

Via contexts crawler.

This video, produced by Mother Jones, shows Pastor Rod Parsley arguing that America was founded to destroy Islam and has a divine mandate to do so.  It is interesting on at least two levels:

First, as a response to the Reverend Wright story, it reminds us that Wright is not the only preacher who says outrageous things, and Obama is not the only politician to get “spiritual guidance” from a controversial figure.  In which case, the question might be: Which outrageous preachers are most likely to be targeted as problematic?  And by who?

Second, the video could be used to demonstrate how a person can be made to appear frightening or evil through editing.  In this case, the move to slow motion, the use of black-and-white, the strategic stills.

In many ways, this video, produced by the left, uses many of the same tactics as the anti-Reverend Wright clips on Fox News and elsewhere. For comparison, The Daily Show put together a montage of coverage that appears in the clip below (at about 6 minutes, 51 seconds) that uses choice words (“fiery”), tone of voice, and fast motion:

Thanks to Joe DeM. for tipping us off to the Mother Jones video!

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

See also these and these.

Thanks again, p.j.!

From the website of The Maid Brigade, a housecleaning service offering “green” cleaning services.

Who hires house cleaners (or as they put it, “who needs a maid?”)?

Who cleans houses?

When I went through the whole site I was able to find one picture of a white, non-Hispanic-appearing woman cleaning and one picture of a somewhat dark-skinned homeowner, but the overwhelming pattern is what you see here.

And no, there were no male maids. Do you really even have to ask?

Anyway, it’s an interesting example of class, the commodification of housework, and the ways that class and race separate women, such that upper-middle-class white women often free themselves from the second shift of housework by hiring other poorer, often non-white women to do it.

NEW! (Jan. ’10): Sara L. sent us another example:

This ad, playing on white resentment about affirmative action, ran during the 1990 North Carolina Senate race between Harvey Gantt and Jesse Helms:

Before the ad ran (during the last week of the campaign), Gantt was ahead in the polls. The ad is widely believed to be the reason Helms won.

Might be good to pair with the infamous Willy Horton ad from the 1988 Presidential campaign in a discussion of how images of minorities have been used to frighten white voters.

According to research by the Pew Research Center, a majority agree with the statement that immigrants work harder than whites at low-wage jobs, but Blacks and Hispanics are more likely to think so.

Story here via C.N. Le.